New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 eBook

and declares that it was England who in 1911
was ready to land 160,000 men at Antwerp to help
the French against the Germans.

As to who will ultimately win in the
war, the pamphlet asks whether it will be the
striving nation, the young strength, or the old peoples,
France and England, with their flagging civilization
in alliance with Muscovite retrogression.

* * * *
*

HOW THE WAR CAME ABOUT.

Who is responsible for the war?—­Not Germany!
England’s policy! Her shifting of responsibility
and promoting the struggle while alone possessing
power to avert it.

It is an old and common experience that after the
outbreak of a war the very parties and persons that
wanted the war, either at once or later, assert that
the enemy wanted and began it. The German Empire
especially always had to suffer from such untruthful
assertions, and the very first days of the present
terrible European war confirm again this old experience.
Again Russian, French, and British accounts represent
the German Empire as having wanted the war.

Only a few months ago influential men and newspapers
of Great Britain as well as of Paris could be heard
to express the opinion that nobody in Europe wanted
war and that especially the German Emperor and his
Government had sincerely and effectively been working
for peace. Especially the English Government,
in the course of the last two years, asserted frequently
and publicly, and was supported by The Westminster
Gazette and a number of influential English newspapers
in the assertion, that Great Britain and the German
Empire during the Balkan crisis of the last few years
had always met on the same platform for the preservation
of peace. The late Secretary of State, von Kiderlen-Waechter,
his successor, Mr. von Jagow, and the Imperial Chancellor,
von Bethmann-Hollweg, likewise declared repeatedly
in the Reichstag, how great their satisfaction was
that a close and confidential diplomatic co-operation
with Great Britain, especially in questions concerning
the Near East, had become a fact. And it has
to be acknowledged today that at that time the German
and British interests in the Near East were identical
or at any rate ran in parallel lines.

The collapse of European Turkey in the war against
the Balkan Alliance created an entirely new situation.
At first Bulgaria was victorious and great, then it
was beaten and humiliated by the others with the intellectual
help of Russia. There could be no doubt about
Russia’s intentions: she was preparing
for the total subjection of weakened Turkey and for
taking possession of the Dardanelles and Constantinople
in order to rule from this powerful position Turkey
and the other Balkan States. Great Britain and
the German Empire, which only had economic interests
in Turkey, were bound to wish to strengthen Turkey
besides trying to prevent the Muscovite rule on the
whole Balkan peninsula.